20 May 2011

mapping venture capital relationships

Check out this paper I wrote for a networks class that measures connectedness and prominence of different venture capital firms in Silicon Valley:

Mapping Venture Capital Relationships<script type="text/javascript">(function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();</script>

19 Mar 2011

a thought on bubbles

There's been a lot of talk recently in the web technology sector of a new bubble. Valuations are increasing across the board, the demand for talent is growing, and everyone and their mother appears to be working on a startup. All this bubble talk has got me thinking about what really constitutes a bubble and if its actually possible to recognize a bubble while its actually happening.

The best rule that I've come up with to gauge this is the presence of what I like to call "multicollinear expectations." Looking at documentation of the real estate bubble a few years ago and talking to people about the education sector (which I suspect is also in the midst of a bubble) I realized that the key to understanding whether or not a sector/industry is in a bubble is to see if people's expectations of the future of that sector are positively affected by other people's optimism. For example, if you were to take five people and individually ask them their opinion of the future of a sector they would likely give you their honest opinions (and their predictions would probably be quite reasonable). However, if you place them in a room together and ask the group for their expectations of the future of a sector, if a bubble were occurring you'd see that the average prediction for the group together was actually higher than the average of each individual's opinion.

In most bubbles, this type of behavior tends to manifest itself as a fear of being left out or left behind. This feeling, when our expectations of the future become overly dependent upon each other's perceptions of the future and result in a collective view that is more optimistic than each of our independent views, is arguably what leads to bubble-like behavior. I believe that this can be used as a pretty good indicator for judging if a bubble exists.

So, the $64,000 question: Does this hold true for the web/mobile/consumer technology sector today?

7 Feb 2011

A friend and a few of his roommates just started a great new fitness blog. They're trying to do 10,000 pushups over the next 100 days before graduation. Check it out: http://10thousandpushups.tumblr.com/

29 Jan 2011
25 Jan 2011
"Leadership is about doing the possible, not sitting around and waiting for the perfect." 

- Michael Bloomberg 
15 Jan 2011

P1691

I finally got it! Go to www.squareup.com to get one. Oh and sorry in advance for trying to convince you to give me money at some point in the future.

16 Dec 2010
web 1.0 problems were computer engineering problems
web 2.0 problems are social engineering problems
web 1.0 optimized existing data
web 2.0 optimizes for people to contribute more data
I wonder how these differences will change who builds innovative products and companies on the web now.
10 Dec 2010

P1594

3 Dec 2010

on digital IP

I just found this piece that I wrote in high school in my Google Docs archive. I don't know what it was for, but its actually pretty well written and still relevant three years later:

Property, as the cornerstone of the capitalist system, has long been a source of strife. The revolutionary image of the disenfranchised confiscating land from elites has long represented the traditional struggle between those who have and those who don't. Yet, with the twenty-first century and the internet came a reconceptualization of this archetype, replacing the radical revolutionary with the casual user, the pitchfork and shotgun with the computer mouse and iPod, and the vast estates and factories with endless forms of intellectual and creative property in digital format.

 

Because of the decentralized and impersonal nature of the distribution of intellectual property across borders, the moral rules governing behavior in physical spheres become seemingly inapplicable. Thus, people who find robbery abhorrent and who have no criminal record frequently form the backbone of those participating in creative property theft in digital media. "Discount" DVD dealers from Chicago to Moscow peddle their wares to a public that is often unaware, or simply ambivalent, to the provenance of the media that they are purchasing.

 

While political institutions have been trying to combat the rampant violations of property rights via legislation like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by the US Congress in 1999, such statutes try to regulate an unruly digital Wild West. Many of the visible organs that facilitate these violations locate themselves beyond the reach of the predominantly Western regulatory agencies and copyright laws. Sharman Networks, for example, the parent company of the embattled KaZaA file sharing software, incorporated in Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific that is not a signatory to creative property treaties.

 

Ultimately, the solution lies not in trying to enforce regulations in an unrealistically monolithic fashion, but rather to form alliances with the major sources of creative property theft. Microsoft, one of the leading victims of software piracy, has begun offering purchasing-power-parity adjusted software in emerging markets, as well as pursuing other strategies. One such strategy is a deal signed with the Egyptian government, which had previously pirated much of the software it used, to purchase legitimate Microsoft software in exchange for Microsoft's re-investment of the revenue in a research and development facility in Egypt. Similarly, if record companies were to decrease the cost of online music piracy would be severely diminished.

 

Thus, businesses must learn to deal with a newly digitized international information network, recognizing that their once complete physical control over creative property has fallen at the hands of hackers and the anonymity of the internet. In order for creative property to actualize its maximum profit potential, a radical change must occur in the way corporations approach piracy of their content. It is no longer enough to try to enforce a set of rules designed for a previous era; piracy is a problem that demands the reformation of property schemes to fit the digital age.

29 Nov 2010

why do startups exist?

Technology startups can be broadly characterized as small, resource-constrained organizations of people attempting to find scalable operating/business models. As Robert Scoble notes in his article on why Google can't build Instagram, the combination of resource constraints and lack of constraints on operational flexibility (no strategic partners to please, public shareholders to answer to) gives startups a unique ability to build elegant technological solutions to problems.

However, something that Scoble doesn't note in his article is why large companies appear to have done/be doing very little to drive the kind of employee engagement that leads to startup-like outcomes. Although plenty of companies are great at organizing small teams (Scoble recognizes this as a primary pillar of startup success) what they're not as good at doing is building the same kinds of incentives that are present in early stage startups: namely the ability to operate with little oversight/change ideas and direction very quickly and the potential to participate in financial gains from their product.

Oddly, building ways to incorporate these same incentives into the work that employees do at large companies seems to be an obvious way to create more entrepreneurially-minded companies and encourage the kind of innovation that happens in small startups. In recent years, companies like Google and Facebook have been more open about pursuing acquisitions solely for the purpose of acquiring teams/innovative ability, and have seen some success with this strategy, but companies still struggle with creating the same kinds of incentives/innovation that happens in startups. In the future, companies that are able to solve this problem will likely be able to produce more innovation internally which could render the startup itself obsolete.

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I'm a student at Yale University. I'm interested in entrepreneurship, technology, music, and finance.

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